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Photographer chronicled the cruelties of apartheid

Alf Kumalo was an unlikely candidate to become one of South Africa’s leading documentary photographers. He had no formal training with a camera and began using one in the 1950s only because the newspaper he worked for as court reporter was so small that he was expected to take the photographs for his own articles.But he was soon captivated by the power of still photography, and after meeting and photographing Nelson Mandela, then a trial lawyer, in courtrooms and elsewhere, Kumalo headed off in a new direction, to become one of the indispensable chroniclers of the cruelties of apartheid and South Africa’s eventual emergence as a multiracial democracy.Kumalo brought to his photography a reporter’s keen eye for detail as well as determination and caginess: when the police cracked down on picture-taking, he posed with his camera on his head as though joking and yielding to the ban but secretly taking shots with a preset timer.As a black photographer, he lived under the same harsh conditions as those whose privations he was documenting. He sometimes fell victim to the same kinds of harassment, the same beatings, the same arrests that he was capturing on film.“South Africa has lost a self-taught giant in the media field who still bears the scars of torture and mental scars of continuous detentions by the apartheid security forces,” the African National Congress, South Africa’s ruling party, said in a statement announcing his death on its web site.Kumalo’s work appeared in a number of prominent publications that covered black culture in South Africa, including The Golden City Post, a daily newspaper, and Drum, a magazine. He later received assignments from The Star, a mainstream South African daily, and from major newspapers outside South Africa, including The New York Times.He had a knack for being where history was unfolding. He was among the photographers who covered the Sharpeville Massacre on March 21, 1960, when 69 people were killed as white police officers fired on a crowd protesting the South African pass laws, which restricted the movements of blacks. The killings helped catalyze resistance to apartheid.In 1963, he photographed the so-called Rivonia trial (named for the Johannesburg suburb where ANC leaders had a hide-out), which sent Mandela and several others to prison for more than 20 years. In the 1970s, he photographed the activist Steven Biko and covered the rise of Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement. In 1976, he was present during the Soweto uprising, a student revolt spurred by the government’s declaration that Afrikaans, the language of white Afrikaners, would be the mandatory language of school instruction. The protest, met with violence by the police, spread to black townships across the country.In the 1990s, as apartheid fell, Kumalo photographed the country’s first democratic elections and the inauguration of Mandela as its first black president.Kumalo was also known for portraits and documentary pictures of dignitaries and celebrities, including Muhammad Ali (he covered the “Rumble in the Jungle,” Ali’s 1974 bout with George Foreman in Zaire), the musicians Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba, the tennis star Arthur Ashe, and the Rev. Desmond Tutu.He took hundreds of photographs of Mandela, both before and after his 27-year imprisonment, as well as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela when she was Mandela’s wife. Many were of her and their children while Mandela was in prison.Alfred Kumalo was born in Alexandra, a Johannesburg township, on September 5, 1930. He greased cars for a mechanic before he landed the job at Bantu World, the small newspaper that gave him his start as a reporter and photographer.Kumalo opened a photography museum and school in Soweto in 2002. In 2010, he played himself in “The Bang Bang Club,” a film based on a book about the end of apartheid by two photographers, Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva.“Alf was many things that are hard to quantify,” said Silva, who worked with Kumalo at The Star and now works for The New York Times. “Certainly a photographic treasure. And he was a great gentleman.”“Alf Kumalo was more than a documentary photojournalist; he was, above all, one of South Africa’s eminent historians,” a former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, said in a statement. “No one could contradict the truth of what he captured so competently through the lens. Aware that the power of his narrative was unimpeachable, the apartheid regime subjected him to constant harassment in the hope that Kumalo, a humble and tenacious man of integrity, would abandon his work or sell his soul altogether. He did not.”Kumalo was married and had a number of children, but specific information about his survivors was not immediately available.Bruce Weber, The New York Times